Got the valve covers and coils installed which now leads me to my next project, the stinking valve cover bolts stand out and look like shit so I will be making a few covers for them, then get back to cleaning up the wiring as well as some other things in the engine compartment.

Thanks. I think when all the little things are done it's going to clean up nicely.

I had a few minutes to screw with some caps for the valve cover bolts. I did a couple of test pieces but am not sure which one I will go with. I'm leaning towards the larger one, I can trim it down a tiny bit more and then polish or powdercoat them. Leaning towards polishing to break things up a little.

Great idea on the caps! Looking at insulation on your firewall reminds me on why I decided to take all stuff out.

Thanks

I did make another one to size and polished it and decided that's the way to go but one thing leads to another lol so I'm going to have to make some for the intake manifold bolts, I have quite a few covers we use on motorcycles but none fit the bolts used on these cars so I'll most likely be making some for other things as well. Although hard to see there is a slight dome to them so they match my strut covers, washer reservoir cover and any other covers I make will be the same as well. This will be very time consuming as my lathe is rather large and not cnc, so I'll be crankin' dials. lol

As usual necessity will determine my next project. Transmission gave me some trouble today. I was cruising along in 6th when it felt like I threw it in neutral, bounced off the rev limiter before I could react. Didn't know what happened, when I looked at the display it showed being in "S" when I was using tapshift. Figured it has something to do with my shifter as I was testing shifters for a couple of days and thought maybe I pinched a wire on mine, went back into tapshift and all was fine. About 20 miles later the dash lit up and the transmission went into limp mode. Through a code, lost contact with TCM. Then thought maybe with the heavy down pours the connection to the TCM got wet so put it on a rack but everything was ok. Checked and found the fuse to the TCM blew. Tried it and all was fine for a few miles and then again. Looking around under the hood I noticed that the tie wraps holding my wiring harness up broke and the wires to the tranny hit the headers. So my next project will be cleaning up some of the wiring under the hood and making some sort of brackets or clamps instead off tie wraps. The wires were moved when I made the coil mounts so they no longer run along the valve covers. I'll post pictures when I come up with something.

I love the center console cluster you created! Make another and sell it to me! :P

It is something I was thinking of offering but it was labor intensive. Making the panel itself isn't bad but cutting up and piecing together the gauge cluster is the hard part. A lot of room for error. I was thinking about having a mold made so they can be produced somewhat efficiently but I tend to work on things I can do completely in house but it may be possible in the future.

Have a lot of ideas for some new stuff for my car, normally I drive it all winter but this year will be different, not by choice. Seems I may have blown the converter or trans. So it's in my shop for some much needed maintenance and a head start on the new products I'll be working on. I may even finish all the ones I've started before lol.

As of now plans include

finishing of my consul

finishing the wiring/cleaning up under the hood

finishing the mails slot/lower scoops and intake

major suspension upgrades

finishing the wheels

possible hood/spoiler modifications or replacement

a custom paint job is in the future depending on when I finish some body mods I've been playing with.

First thing will be to pull the trans/converter and see what happened, hopefully in the next week or two and then I'll move on.

Finally had a chance to spend some time on my car. While I was waiting for a chance to get it up on a lift to see what was up with the converter/transmission I started on some coil covers for my custom coil mounts. May be working on a set for the stock mounts but I'll post more on that later.

Well, I did get the transmission out and found that it was the converter making the noise. The drive hub is broken. The pieces were still in the hub area so I removed the front seal and got them out. It is a 3600 stall billet converter so I would not expect this on a street only car. Here's a shot of it.

Well, it seems that both pieces broke off cleanly and there are no missing pieces. Change the fluid and filter and the tranny should be fine. Now just have to figure out what converter to go with. Definitely not one of these again.

While the tranny is out and I'm waiting on the converter I started on some coil covers to go with my custom mounts. They're a lot of machine work but I got a good start on them. I am going to contour them to the coils to keep them as small and light as possible. Here's a quick shot of the first machining step, still a long ways to go.

Had a chance to screw around with the coil covers a little. Cut out the pocket for the coil to sit in and roughed out the outside profile. It still needs to be trimmed down and prettied up before I can finalize the program then machine a full set. Here is where I'm at now.